“We get messages from mothers and families saying: “Thank you for helping me explain to my family what I am experiencing”.”

TikTok is an increasingly popular platform without an age limit of the audience and creators. 15 to 60-second videos offer audience information, challenge them to dance, or just take user’s minds off every day worries. All sorts of professionals are using TikTok to build their brand or just have a little bit of fun. Medical workers are no exception.

First: rules of TikTok

There are three “laws” for successful TikTok posts: make people laugh, tell a personal story people can empathize with, or teach people something. Doctors use the platform to talk about their career paths or specialties; many nurses use TikTok to record dancing routines during the breaks in their shifts. There’s an MRI image explanatory channel , and specialists from a broad spectrum talk about their expertise or give insight into their working environment. 

MD candidates from the US Amanda d’Almeida and Dan Villavecer are the faces behind Medicine Explained - the channel with over 1.1 million of followers, explaining everyday issues such a “What is a brain freeze? How do menstrual cups work? What is scoliosis? Can women exercise, bathe or swim during their period?” etc. Dan and Amanda started creating content as a way to fight medical misinformation on the internet. 

Medicine Explained was started to decentralize medical information by making it understandable to everyone, acting as preventative health education to people around the world who may never have access to proper healthcare, but have access to social media. With fake news and misinformation spreading on social media, they wished to create a reliable channel people could turn to for medical knowledge.

"We noticed a lot of confusion circling around about health information. At the same time, we had a lot of training and finding the right information going to the right sources, which are available only to scientists and highly educated people. We wanted to share that knowledge to everybody. Information is not available and decentralized to everybody until it is understandable by everybody. Our big goal is to make medical content understandable and digestible, which is what we strive for with our cartoon drawings approach," says Amanda. 

World-wide reach and sensitivity

In less than 6 months, Medicine Explained has amassed over 1.1 million followers and over 100 million views worldwide. The hashtag #MedicineExplained has over 100 Million views on the platform. 

Followers come from all over the world - India, Brazil, Philippines, Canada, Mexico. A lot of the topics presented on their channel come from the suggestions of the audience. However, Dan and Amanda additionally prioritize topic based on their own judgment. As mentioned by Amanda, "A lot of times, people don't know what they don't know. And so we try our best to get out messages that we think are important as well."

They received a lot of positive feedback for topics regarding women's health or sexual health, which can be taboos and are not discussed in families or in school. "We've received a lot of positive comments that for some followers Tiktok is the only place they've been able to get this information from. We've had a few people comment that they've saved all of our period related posts to show them to their daughters when they're trying to talk to them about menstruation. They said we make it really easy to understand, and we try to make it very comfortable to talk about." 

Sexual health, however, can be a sensitive topic and Dan and Amanda experienced censorship of one of their posts: "There are a few things that you can't say or do. We are very careful at navigating content restrictions. For example, one of our posts was "Are my nipples normal?". Nipples can't shown in posts so we drew one out, and we also said the word. The post was almost immediately taken down. So we have to be really careful about how we present sexual education so that we aren't censored, but are still able to get our message out," says Amanda. 

"Younger generations of medical students take technology for granted".

Dan Villavecer is a current Doctor of Medicine (MD) candidate in the US, and is the President of Medical Entrepreneurship at the medical school he is visiting. He received his Masters of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Prior to starting his medical education, he worked at Forward (goforward.com) in San Francisco, which was among the first primary care practice providers with a truly patient-centered design. Amanda d'Almeida is a current dual Doctor of Medicine (MD) and Master of Public Health (MPH) candidate. She was part of Nature published Beat AML program, which created the largest-to-date dataset on primary acute myeloid leukemia (AML) samples offering genomic, clinical, and drug response data. They both currently work as interns at Lumos - AI-powered search tool for doctors that gives direct answers to clinical questions, using trustworthy sources. 

Asked about how much interest for digital health they see among their peers, Dan says less than one would expect: "When I was the head of the entrepreneurship group at our medical school I did not see much interest in digital health. I think that's mostly due to lack of exposure. For students in our generation technology is a part of our daily life. And I think we take that for granted. We don't realize that it hasn't really translated that well to the hospital and to the medical care setting." 

Medical education is still very traditional. Amanda: "As medical students, we need to learn a lot of information, and we're studying specifically for board exams. So our medical education is really catered towards that goal and honestly, we have yet to be exposed to any digital health. I've talked to a few of my friends across the country and asked about their medical school curriculum. Health tech isn't really addressed in any of these settings.” With the awareness that digitization is happening in all areas of healthcare and medicine, Dan and Amanda look forward to the future, which they believe will be positive. Amanda: ”Dan and I want to be a part of this revolution. We think it is definitely going to happen, and digital health can help bridge a lot of these healthcare disparity gaps and make health care much easier and more accessible for everyone."

Coming up 26 June: F086 TikTok 2/2: Weird medical facts with Karan Raj